The Jennifer Finch memoir publication has been confirmed for 19 January 2027, with Shooting Up and Making Out: A Memoir of My Life in LA and L7 arriving posthumously after the L7 bassist died in July of this year at the age of 59.
Co-written with Jeff Alulis and completed before her death, the book chronicles Finch’s teenage years in the Los Angeles punk scene, her struggle with heroin addiction, and her time in bands including Courtney Love’s Sugar Babydoll and L7, a pioneering feminist grunge act. It will be released via Da Capo.
Two Years in the Making: The Story Behind the Jennifer Finch Memoir
According to a press statement from Alulis, he and Finch spent two years working on the book together. ‘We worked together for two years to make sure she was happy with every word of it,’ Alulis said, ‘and with someone as intentional and thoughtful as Jennifer, that was no small task! I’m heartbroken that she won’t get to see it published, but I’m thrilled to share her life and legacy with the world.’
The memoir’s scope takes in the full sweep of Finch’s life in Los Angeles, the underground punk circuit that shaped her, the chaos and community of the early grunge era, and L7’s ascent to becoming one of the defining feminist voices in heavy music. That the book was completed and signed off before her death gives it a weight and intentionality that Alulis’s statement makes plain. Finch knew what she wanted to say, and she made sure it got said.
Publishing the Jennifer Finch memoir is Da Capo, and according to Blabbermouth, the imprint is part of Grand Central Publishing and the Hachette Book Group. Ben Schafer, executive editor at Da Capo, is overseeing the project. The institutional weight of Hachette behind a memoir like this matters: it signals a mainstream platform for a story rooted in genuinely underground music history, the kind of scene documentation that usually ends up in a zine or a self-published PDF.
Jennifer Finch’s Death and L7’s Farewell Tour
Finch died on 18 July at the age of 59. She had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2011 and, more recently, an aggressive form of brain cancer. According to the GoFundMe set up by her L7 bandmates, ‘unforeseen complications’ with radiation treatment led to Finch undergoing multiple surgeries.
The loss hits hard for anyone who tracked L7 across their run, a band whose 1992 LP Bricks Are Heavy remains a landmark of the era, and whose refusal to soften their politics or their sound made them an outlier in the major-label feeding frenzy of the early nineties. Finch was not a peripheral figure in that story. She was central to it.
Having received Finch’s blessing before her death, L7 will proceed as planned with their North American farewell tour come October. The timing places the tour and the Jennifer Finch memoir publication within months of each other, which means the band’s final chapter and Finch’s own account of the journey will land in close proximity, a concentrated period of documentation and farewell for one of the more underappreciated acts of that generation.
The memoir’s full title, Shooting Up and Making Out: A Memoir of My Life in LA and L7, does not shy away from the harder material. That directness runs through everything Alulis has said about how they approached the writing process together. Finch wanted every word considered, and every word is hers.
Shooting Up and Making Out is published by Da Capo on 19 January 2027.
